For the edgy 21st-century arts curator, mad for site-specific installations, Liverpool is inordinately blessed with remarkable locations. A 19th-century oratory designed to resemble a Greek-Doric temple; a disused Victorian brewery beneath which there lies a lake some 40ft deep; a long abandoned art deco cinema, its ruby interior frozen in time as if its patrons, dressed in their Saturday best, might return at any moment: these are just a few of the city’s more extraordinary buildings, beautiful and mournful in almost equal measure. And also, more to the point, empty and available. But therein lies the catch, of course. If art is not to be upstaged by architecture, the work must either be truly extraordinary, or so powerfully bound to its site that the two can hardly be separated.
Alas, this is a principle the directors of the Liverpool Biennial, now in its ninth “edition”, have more or less ignored, if it was ever in their minds at all. Much of the work they have commissioned (44 projects on 22 sites, for the bargain price, I was told, of £800,000) is not only of dubious quality, but so barely in conversation with the structures that house it as to be insulting – a state of affairs that seems, at least in part, to stem from the decision to present the whole thing as a series of “episodes”. In other words, where there might have been one overarching theme, or none at all, the art is bunched clumsily under six different titles: Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children’s Episode, Software, Monuments from the Future, and Flashback. The first two connect directly to Liverpool, a city whose great 19th-century architects, John Foster (designer of the aforementioned oratory) and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (St George’s Hall), created for it a wondrous neoclassical cityscape, and whose Chinese community is the oldest in Europe; the third speaks to the need for a programme like this to be educational. But the thinking behind the others remains obscure even after you’ve struggled through the waffle in the official guide (“flashbacks can rupture established narratives…”). Why did anyone imagine this might be a good idea? It’s an organisational and intellectual mess.
And the mess doesn’t end there. I went first, in a great rush, to the Oratory, at the entrance to the Anglican cathedral, which I’ve never found open before – and if I was disappointed by the new work on display (its well intentioned but visually tedious centrepiece is a video, Rubber Coated Steel, by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, based on audio files recording the disputed killing of two boys in the occupied West Bank), I was swiftly charmed by the funeral monuments that are (permanently) kept there. “HER ONLY DESIRE FOR HERSELF WAS THAT AT THE RESURRECTION HER LORD MIGHT SAY ‘SHE HATH DONE WHAT SHE COULD,’” it says, beneath an angel carved in memory of Agnes Elizabeth Jones, who nursed the workhouse sick. But then I looked down. At my feet swirled little piles of litter: plastic bottles and cigarette butts, receipts and ringpulls. And it seemed to follow me around, this detritus. Only when I arrived, much later, at Tate Liverpool, whose Biennial gallery appeared not to have been swept in days, did I discover that this was not really rubbish, but a piece entitled What the Living Do, by an American artist Jason Dodge. Wow. If such a bit of mindless decadence appeared in a satirical novel about the contemporary art world, wouldn’t you feel the writer had gone way too far?
From the Oratory, I ducked into the lovely old ABC cinema on Lime Street, where a collection of seemingly random sculptures and assemblages loitered in the gloom while various unfathomable films (by Samson Kambalu, and Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni) played on; and then I headed for FACT on Wood Street, where a survey of work by the Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, explores human displacement. This was better. What’s disturbing about his Homeless Vehicle (1988), a metal cylinder balanced on a trolley in which a human being can sleep, eat and store his few possessions, is that you find yourself thinking, even if only momentarily: this could work. It is, then, a piece that first provokes and then shames, leaving you with a queasy sense of your own complacency.
Unfortunately, my newly stirred mood didn’t last long. A Visit to Rome (2009), a bronze fountain by the American artist Betty Woodman, which supposedly nods not only to classical imagery but also to Matisse and Picasso, looks so feeble – not so much primitive as rickety – dwarfed as it is by the George’s Dock ventilation tower, the art deco marvel of Portland Stone the architect of which, Herbert J Rowse, was influenced by the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. And then there was the display upstairs at the nearby Open Eye gallery. Rain Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian are three Iranian artists who live together in Dubai, and who make sculptures – I use the term loosely – and performance art. In this instance, they’d dressed up as three “submersibles”, Anti-Catty, Space Sheep and Princess Rambo, and then filmed themselves at play. One goofs around with a load of animal trotters. Another, in a frilly dress and a pig mask, keeps giving birth to a watermelon. It’s grotesquery for grotesquery’s sake, like something out of The League of Gentlemen, minus the wit and the drama.
Things only picked up when I headed out of the city centre in the direction of Toxteth (by this time, I’d visited 10 of a planned 14 sites). Cains Brewery is, I think, a missed opportunity, its cavernous canning hall having been filled with a muddle of too-small stuff connecting to a number of “episodes”: more of Dodge’s garbage, more repulsive bewilderments courtesy of Rain Haerizadeh and co, and Outdoors (2016) by the Indian artist Sahej Rahel, a mass of roughly worked and fantastical clay sculptures that “belong within a burgeoning mythology”. But I enjoyed seeing Rita McBride’s (another American) installation in the dank dark of the Victorian Toxteth Reservoir, a cat’s cradle of laser beams that somehow hints at time travel, and I adored the Italian artist Lara Favaretto’s Momentary Monument – The Stone (2016), which stands among boarded-up terraces in Rhiwlas Street. This piece, a huge block of granite, is – at last! – deep in conversation with its context. Like the street around it, its only entry point is a letter box-like slot; its future, in common with that of the terraces before they were finally saved (they’re shortly to be renovated), lies with the wrecking ball that will destroy it once the Biennial is over. In its simplicity there is abiding strength, and it brought a lump to my throat. As to what local people make of it, though, I cannot say. In the late afternoon sunshine, two small boys arrived on their bicycles. “What is it?” said one, settling to sit, rather pertly, on a nearby doorstep. “You tell me,” I said, aiming for nonchalance. But honestly, I could have hugged him, the scamp.
